Tuesday, May 7, 2013

The Doctor’s Grim Reward

He helped lead America to bin Laden. Now he rots in a Pakistani prison.

Shaheena Mamraiz can only wish she had never met the man who strode into
her office one March afternoon last year. Smiling and well dressed in a
black business suit, white shirt, and tie, he seemed bursting with
energy. “I’m Dr. Shakeel Afridi,” he announced. “I want to run a free
hepatitis-B vaccination campaign in the area. I need the data for women
aged between 15 and 40.” Mamraiz, a senior public-health official in the
northwestern Pakistani town of Abbottabad, was taken aback. His
aggressiveness verged on arrogance. “I refused to cooperate,” she tells Newsweek. “He didn’t seem to have any permission.”

That changed two days later with an urgent call from her supervisor in
Peshawar. “Shaheena, please cooperate with Dr. Afridi,” he told her.
Despite her doubts, Mamraiz saw no alternative. On March 16, a week
after Afridi’s first arrival, he was back in Abbottabad, armed with
pamphlets, posters, and ID cards for the roughly 16 health workers and
supervisors who would assist in the campaign. It would consist of two
steps, each lasting two days, he said, and the first would start the
following morning. Each worker was given boxes of syringes and 50 doses
of vaccine. The program was a success, Mamraiz recalls—except for one
thing: the workers had only enough vaccine to immunize the few
neighborhoods Afridi specified. Many locals were disappointed.
“Everybody in town was eager to be vaccinated,” says Mamraiz.